How to Spy on Competitor Pricing & Beat Them

Chad Rubin.m4a What's up, everybody? Chad Rubin here. I'm reporting to you live from the Gatsby Mansion in Austin, Texas. This place is incredible, and we're about to dive deep into some nuggets. Before I do that, I just want to quickly introduce myself. If you haven't heard of me, Chad Rubin. I've been in this space for 20 years. That's right. I've got the hair loss to prove it. And this is some of the portfolio of my work over time. I sold Stubano, which was an inventory management system, an agency, and Prosper Show. I still currently have my e-commerce business; everything I build is derived from that specific business. And I run a company called Prophecy, which is a dynamic pricing software built for brands that sell on Amazon. So we optimize pricing to maximize profit for your business. It's great to meet you. Thanks for listening in. Today, we're going to actually talk about this amazing hack. I love espionage, and I love spying on companies on Amazon. And so we're going to get into that. We're going to talk about how you can outprice them. With this specific hack. So, you ready? Let's buckle up. So I have, like I mentioned, I have this e-commerce business, and I tried everything to turn this thing around. Listing optimization and cutting expenses, optimizing our logistics and FBA, and even PPC. And it just was not working. So I discovered that pricing on Amazon is broken, right? So it's pricing. Nobody changes price. There's a lot of misinformation about price. And brands are losing thousands and millions of dollars because they actually don't touch price. It's the single biggest lever in your business that you don't touch. And it doesn't require you to spend more to make more money. So typically, brands on Amazon actually price products something like this. They look at the marketplace. They see what everyone else is selling. And they look at their price. That person copied their price from somebody else. And the crazy thing is, these people that you're copying are completely broke. So why are you copying them? And so if we do some quick math on just how pricing can improve your business, right? If we take this garlic press, it's a very trite example. It's one that's used all over, which is why I love to use it, is if you take a garlic press for $14. 97, and now you suddenly just increase the price by $1. By $1. Now, we don't know if it's the optimal decision to make. But if you do, your profit can increase 12%. And what that translates to in dollars is $3,400 in monthly profits. And then you apply a conservative multiple of four X to that. That's $41,000 increase. And it doesn't require you to spend more money. So we're going to talk about how do you know how to price your product if you're making the right decision. And so you can do this to your own listing, but you can also do this to your competition. So what we're going to do is we're going to use Zule, Aaron's listing, which everyone knows who this guy is, is the number one selling garlic press on Amazon. And what we're going to do, sorry, Aaron, is that we're going to take his listing and we're going to go, we're going to use the Keepa extension. If you haven't used it, I love Keepa. It shows you historically what's happened with a listing with price. So if you look at this graph, the pink line is the buy box price, the list price. The green line is his ranking position over time. And you can actually change the range and yellow down below here is unit velocity. This is a new addition by Keepa. I'm not making any money on this. I'm just sharing with you that this data is available to you in a Chrome extension, and you can pull this down. Now, why would we pull this down? Because you can actually analyze this. Now I'm using Claude AI to do this. You drop the, the, the graph, you drop the graph into Claude. And so this chart, this is my prompt that I'm using. And it's talking about how, this is the chart that shows your BSR and your price over time. And the prompt really is, is you're a data expert with God-like reasoning skills and a profound pricing data, technical knowledge background. Your job is to help me interpret this graph. So I'm essentially, that's what I'm providing here. Pretty massive, uh, prompt for this specifically. And what you'll get in return though, is quite novel and quite beautiful. By the way, you can get this prompt right here. If you're listening in, scan that you'll get the prompt right away. Uh, what you'll get is an analysis that goes deeply into how much money you're leaving on the table and why price decisions are made the way they're made by either you or by your competitors. And you can see right down below here, it's actually making suggestions of how much money you're leaving on the table and what are the recommended changes. It's actually doing the elasticity planning for you specifically in this prompt. It's amazing. I use this all the time to analyze price. Now you want to know exactly what your customers are willing to pay more for, or when you made a change and what happened to BSR, or when your competitors made a change, when they made the change, why they made the change, when you should actually be pushing your price up. Is that the right decision? Or when maybe you want to actually push pricing down in the off season to drive more BSR, or perhaps is maybe this, something killing your margins and what you should be doing instead. This is all from the specific prompt. Now, one of the things that you can be doing is you can be using a spreadsheet to actually, now that you're armed with the insights from that prompt, you can use a spreadsheet. This framework is what I actually, uh, was using to turn around my company before I started Prophecy to automate this process for you. And so for every single ASIN, you want to actually pull in and aggregate, uh, all this information like BSR, your year over year BSR, your units sold, uh, your current price, what the previous price was. And then on top of that, your ad spend, your cards, your profit. And then you want to also take your competition information, pull that in. And what you want to do is you want to actually assign what's your goal for the SKU. What's your intention for the SKU and start making smart and conscious price changes after analyzing that prompt and seeing what the output was. Uh, to your listing so that you could actually be harmonizing your price with the demand that's happening on the Amazon marketplace. If you want that spreadsheet boom right there in the QR code, giving it away for free, you can use it, use it to optimize your price, uh, and using data to drive the decisions because you want to see what's happening when you make changes to price, not just to make willy nilly changes, right? You're using data it to drive the decisioning process. Now, I realize that it's a lot of work to do or to share, especially if you have a lot of SKUs or if you just don't have the time. And so this is why we created Prophecy. At Prophecy, you'll see a 10% lift of profit. Sometimes 20, sometimes 30, sometimes even way more than that. But on average, brands see a 10% lift of profit. Now, here's an example. Now, a lot of people in the space that are customers, we have over a hundred customers using Prophecy, they don't want to share the numbers. Luckily, I have Mina who was open to sharing his numbers. And I'm going to share with you his numbers today in a real live case study. We made him a whole lot more money. And I'm going to use this graph first. And you can see the red line is profit of this year. The blue line is profit of last year. At the bottom here is our price changes that we're dynamically rotating on a daily basis using AI to maximize for him profit. Now, we're going to maximize profit for him specifically without sacrificing his ranking position, his discoverability. And you can see what happened. We actually were changing price. We decided to surge pricing here. And you can see what happens to that red line and the blue line. It starts to widen. And that is us capitalizing on the inefficiencies that exist in the market. Based on the Amazon marketplace. Now, this is just like something that would happen on Wall Street. Wall Street is not an efficient market. And neither is Amazon. Amazon customers are making imperfect, unpredictable, irrational decisions all the time. And so is your competition. And when this happens, you can capitalize on this if you have the right technology. Now, I want to share his listing with you. Now, check this out. We're going to go to his listing. I'm going to zoom in here. We're going to scroll down. Like I mentioned, we're going to use Keepa again. So, you go here. We're going to go to all time. This is fascinating. And what you're seeing here again is pink, is price. Green is his ranking position. Now, most brands on Amazon copy their price and they just leave it there. You can see this here. This flat line right here is his price. He never rarely changes price. He runs a coupon or discount here or there. Never changing price. We come in. We start dynamically rotating price. Now, watch what happens. We start dynamically rotating price. The green line, look what happens to his rank. It drops, which means that he's now increasing his demand. He's more discoverable. And you can see that we raise the average selling price. This was his price before. On average, we've raised his price significantly. Look at what happens to his rank. It drops, stays low; then we surge pricing. So you can see that surge I was talking about earlier. We actually went to Mina and we said, hey, the model wants to explore a higher price. You have more pricing power than you think you have. Are you open to us raising your price? Because we were pricing within his boundaries, within his constraints that he's given us. He said, sure, rip off the lid. We did. And if you look at what happened here, we've sustained those price increases. This was a seven-figure profit capture opportunity that paid for his wedding. It's pretty amazing, actually. So, this is what's possible with price. And I just want to share that with everybody. And that's about it. If you want to get these slides that I've shared today, if you want to get the prompts, if you want to get the spreadsheet, you can feel free to email me. Email me at prophecy. com. You can use the code HACKER. You can scan that QR code right there. I want to thank everyone for listening. Thanks for letting me share. I want to be respectful of your time and hope you got a lot out of this.